First week: Education of the future

Technology is present in our daily lives, and schools are an important evidence. Everyday new tablets are brought to schools, new electronic books are used in order to work with inside the classroom and new computers are introduced to facilitate researches and interactive activities without the necessity of going to the computers lab. But will be able to do a good use of technologies inside the classroom?

There are many things that come to my mind when asking this, as if  teachers will be able to deal with the excess of ICTs inside our classrooms, or if technological devices will be the only tool present in our future classrooms.

Education is clearly connected to technologies and so, the terminology Educational technology has emerged. Wikipedia describes it as the effective use of technological tools in learning. As a concept, it concerns an array of tools, such as media, machines and networking hardware, as well as considering underlying theoretical perspectives for their effective application.

This means that technology is a tool that helps education to be more effective, but we have to use it consciously and carefully if we don’t want it to overshadow our own way of teaching, which is more traditional in some aspects, but has to be conserved in some way if we don’t want to lose our culture and way of living. For example, devices gives us the opportunity to write faster and provides us with different tools which correct our spelling and grammar, among other things, avoiding the necessity of knowing how to write properly or have a good hand writing, which nowadays has importance in our society.

Knowing that, there are many things to analyse, which include the good things that technology has. For example it technology helps us to browse anything we can imagine and find it in few seconds and there is a lot of information to compare and analyze, which is pretty useful when we want to do activities with the students related to browsing new information that the kids propose. Furthermore, we can have free and instant access to every web page or app connected to a WI-FI network from our devices or use the cloud, which is the safest way to save and share our documents and also we can create an online community or a virtual campus to work all together.

But, obviously, there are some cons to have in mind, such as the problems of technology as distraction and even worst, an addiction which can be dangerous both because of the prejudicial effects in our body and the waste of time that generates and makes us forget about other important things . Moreover, we have to be careful when surfing on the internet, avoid some kind of web pages and be aware of the different kind of virus that can infect our devices, and students have to be aware of this issues if we want them to surf on the internet safely. Therefore, the excess of information can confuse and stress us if we don’t know how to manage it in a proper way.

So, taking into account what we can do or what we should avoid when using our devices inside the classroom, it is a matter of time to get used to them and make them work as a tool and not as a distraction, using them for specific activities that could be more significant and enjoyable this way, but without forgetting about the more traditional ways of teaching and learning, that can be equally effective for both, teachers and students.

The best way of making it possible, is understanding the way technologies can benefit us, and take profit of them in a safety and conscious way, creating activities and situations in which they can be useful for learning and developing the basic skills students have to acquire during their education.